Jodrell Bank Gets Grant to Observe the Big Bang

13 May 1999

Jodrell Bank, part of the Department of Physics and Astromomy, has been
awarded a grant by PPARC for nearly 0.5M pounds to operate the Very
Small Array (VSA) Cosmic Microwave
Background (CMB) telescope jointly with Cambridge University.
This award follows the capital grant from PPARC made in 1996 for the
construction of the telescope, which was for 2.6M pounds, some 1.1M pounds
of which came to Manchester.

The VSA is a radio telescope system to be installed on Mt Teide, Tenerife
later this year. The telescope consists of 14 antennas with cryogenically
cooled state-of-the-art low noise receivers built at Jodrell Bank,
vital to achieving the extreme sensitivity required.
The amplifiers, developed jointly with the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the USA, are the lowest noise
amplifiers ever achieved at this frequency. The system will operate over
a bandwidth centred on a wavelength of 1 cm, a frequency of 30 GHz,
to allow subtraction of extraneous foreground emissions from our Galaxy.

The CMB provides us with a snapshot of the Universe as it was just
300,000 years after the Big Bang.
The VSA, which builds on the success of earlier Manchester studies on
Tenerife, will allow us to make high sensitivity maps of the CMB covering
about 1/100 of the sky. The resolution is designed to allow us to investigate
structure on angular scales from 2.5 degrees to 10 arcminutes, where
the maximum information about the early Universe is to be found.
Two-dimensional mapping of real features in the CMB radiation will
be important in determining the overall topology of the Universe
enabling us to set contraints on the age and the size of the Universe,
and predict how it will evolve in the future.